Tennessee Williams -- Facts And Feelings

April 21, 1985|By Reviewed by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

There's little question that of these two books about the late playwright Tennessee Williams, Dotson Rader's intimate memoir, Tennessee: Cry of the Heart is the more absorbing and entertaining. Especially after reading Donald Spoto's somewhat plodding Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams, one comes to Rader's book as upon an oasis and eagerly laps up the gossip and the anecdotes that Rader has supplied.

It is here that we finally learn how Williams talked: ''How much do you get a night?'' said he to the author the first time they met, at a 1969 lower Manhattan party celebrating the opening of a pornographic film. ''One hundred bucks,'' said Rader, playing along with the joke. ''Well, baby,'' said Williams, ''what do you charge to escort an older gentleman to dinner?''

It is here that we learn about the playwright's working idiosyncrasies. ''For some unfathomable reason he was loath to buy paper; instead he wrote on the back of commercial stationery. That may have been purely because of convenience; more likely it was due to his tightness with a buck.'' It is here that we get a sense of his personality -- his humor, his pride, his stubbornness, his character quirks. Rader became a close friend of Williams' from the time of their first meeting until the playwright's death in 1983. The two talked often and intimately, and Rader has knitted the results into a candid and sometimes quite touching portrait of a man he clearly loved.

Unfortunately, his accuracy cannot be entirely trusted. He makes an unconvincing case that Williams was a political radical at heart and that he was drawn by Rader into a deep commitment to the anti-Vietnam movement. He reports without question Williams' mocking version of a female friend's hysterical pregnancy, neglecting to point out that the woman was actually dying of stomach cancer. He absurdly misidentifies an individual that the playwright perceived to be persecuting him. The best that can be said about Cry of the Heart is that it is a version of reality as Williams and his coterie perceived it.

Just how distorted this reality was can be seen from Donald Spoto's Kindness of Strangers, a more conventional biography.

From the broader perspective of Spoto's narrative we perceive that there are two sides to many of the stories that Rader presents only one side of. We learn that despite Williams' fury over the incident, his brother, Dakin, had good reasons for committing him to a hospital for drug therapy (an act for which Tennessee wrote Dakin out of his will). We see how irrational was Williams' decision to dismiss his agent and benefactor, Audrey Wood, and how fantastic was his claim that she was plotting to exploit him. We come to understand that the dismissal of his late work was fairly widespread and not confined to a small list of critics and bogymen that he blamed for the decline of his reputation.

Unhappily, Spoto's view of his subject is a little too objective. Instead of anecdote and personal texture, what we mainly get is chronology, itinerary, inventory, plot summary, and an irritating repetition of the word ''great'' that prompts one to reflect that while Williams may well have been the best playwright that the American theater has produced, surely compared with the likes of Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg, he falls somewhat short of greatness. Spoto also goes on at some theoretical length about the Dionysian element in Williams' pursuit of sex and art. Rader observes somewhat more practically that his creativity ''required the constant exercising of his emotions, taking them to the breaking point and then coming back and writing what he experienced.'' Spoto dryly observes that from ''his earliest one-act plays in 1938 to the end of his life, the name and image'' of his sister Rose ''and her beloved roses pursued him,'' and then in a footnote provides us with ''a few select examples'' of the rose imagery in his work. Rader offers us a much earthier theory of the meaning of roses to Williams -- a theory that concludes with his speculation that among the pressures that drove Tennessee to homosexuality was guilt over his attraction to his sister and his grandmother, both of whom were named Rose.

In short, Spoto supplies us with facts, and Rader gives us feelings. Spoto makes Williams' life sound like unrelieved suffering; Rader shows us that there was laughter amidst the agony. Each book enriches the other and saves it from its excesses. Anyone interested in the desperate and extraordinary life of this American genius will therefore be best off reading the two books together.